Phone Book Check-In: Phone Books Accuse City of Waste, Coverage Reaches New Yorker

Oh, happy day, what is reaching the New Yorker about our fair city is our... phone book opt-out system. But this Book Bench blog post is good fleshing-out. It's also right on the money, saying that they're "a nuisance, a tolerated vestige of another era, or a useful tool, depending on your attitude and habits," but concluding with this:

Dex One has argued that phone-book usage remains high in rural areas, that people who they deliver books to actually use them, and that the industry is already regulating itself, that is, not delivering books indiscriminately. But common sense, shared experience, and bountiful evidence suggest that the phone book's continued viability relies more on its ubiquity than its usefulness. Just because it is familiar, doesn't mean it's worth saving. Imagine if someone delivered a free V.C.R., Walkman, or Mini-Disc player to your doorstep. And then next year, long after you'd thrown it out, that another one appeared.

To be fair, the walkmen, VCRs and Mini-Disc players (can I add Laserdisc?) are a little harder to recycle, but the sentiment remains. This whole debacle--just the ability to opt-out, not stopping delivery to rural areas that may need them--is dragging us backward, and resisting the progress we've already made with our technology. The phone book is outmoded and unnecessary, and I'd love to be able to stop having to deal with it when it shows up at my apartment.

As such, and as previous coverage here on Seattlest has indicated, we are no friend to the phone books. Presumably, the author of the above piece will begin to get emails like this from the Local Search Association, as we have at least every other day since we first covered it:

Given your recent coverage of the City of Seattle’s ordinance regarding Yellow Pages distribution, I wanted to share the following press release announcing that Yellow Pages publishers have filed a notice of appeal of a Seattle judge’s denial of their request to enjoin Seattle’s phone book law. The publishers have requested that the Seattle District Court temporarily stay the ordinance until the United States Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in San Francisco has an opportunity to review their appeal.

Despite being kind of a broken record since they first sued back in November, they're still appealing. Plus, they're still pushing their own opt-out service, like they have been, which they say is preferable and more trustworthy (what?) than the city's. And... less wasteful? According to that press release (emphasis mine):

In statistics released this week, the City noted the number of opt-out requests it had received though its new website, but wasn’t able to indicate whether those requests to stop delivery were new requests or they were duplicate requests from residents who have already opted-out through www.yellowpagesoptout.com or individual publishers’ sites.

What, really? You just started developing that site in October, when, um, we passed the ordinance. We'd been discussing this issue for a while already. Archive.org snapshots of the actual site don't pop up until this year; before that, up to November, it redirects to a halfassed, hidden opt-out on ypassociation.org. Rather than an alternative that has been here all along, this is a direct PR response.

Time to stop rehashing what they have to say before I become Seattlest's Andy Rooney.

Meanwhile, Rep. Reuven Carlyle wants to extend the government-controlled opt-out statewide. A busy time for the lonely, outmoded phone book.